“If Today Was Your Last Day” – Nickelback

In steely gravely tones, If Today Was Your Last Day really hits the reality spot. It preaches a message that desperately needs to be heard in today’s quite false “plastic” life of material temptation and riches, video games and virtual friendships—the postmodern romance. If today was to be our last day on earth would that change our perspective? That’s a rhetorical question, of course!

Saying goodbye to yesterday seems to be a prevailing theme in living genuinely for today. How hard would it be to live as if today was really our last day? Would we finally start to do the things we’ve put off, like forever? Would we forgive our enemies, seeing finally the banality of any differences we might have with them?

It appears to me there’s a lot of luck involved in life and whether we live or die, now, yesterday or tomorrow… or fifty years from now. Yeah, sure, some of us attribute to God everything, but if today was my last day, that’s the fact of relevance, nothing more. I’ll meet God, finally, sure, but what about those final opportunities I had… what about them?

If today was your last day

And tomorrow was too late

Could you say goodbye to yesterday?

These words of the lyric of Nickelback’s song have a hauntingly eternal and inescapable feel about them. It forces us into a corner of fast, obdurate introspection. God has us where he likes us, thinking about the things of truth, light, life, love and legacy.

It seems maddening, however, that most people will inevitably walk the other way refusing to own up to the fact of their very existence. The lights of life are dimmed and the mood’s subdued and padded by pleasure and ease. It’s ironical that this is the backdrop that provides all our relational problems; a setup where our yesterday’s and tomorrow’s hold us captive to the ever beckoning nothing.

If today was your last day… ‘As if,’ I hear you say… Let’s not be so sure!